I think there is something here about the kinds of people who are steady hands not necessarily having great leverage either in terms of pay or status. But realistically such a person may be very costly to replace or do a very valuable role. 

In that way, a sensible organisation would increase their pay and (to the extent possible) status by reflecting not on the change of their output from year to year, but actually how difficult they are to replace, which might be weeks of hiring, months of training, months of management time and perhaps years of time passing to get back to the function working as well as it previously did.  

It is tricky to think how such negotiations can take place properly, but it seems likely to me that the sort of person who is likely to be a steady hand might not be agitatng for such, but that in turn means those who would say if paid more, appreciated more, don't see that option available to them.

I sort of think this is a reason not to have EA-endorsed politicians unless someone has really done the due diligence. This is a pretty high trust community and people expect something someone says confidently to be rubustly tested but political recommendations (and some charity ones to be fair) seem much less well researched than general discussions on policy etc.

I don't think the community tag is warranted on this post.

Argument: Nietzschean Perfectionism

@Richard Y Chappell🔸 theorises that:

maybe the best things in life—objective goods that only psychologically complex “persons” get to experience—are just more important than creature comforts (even to the point of discounting the significance of agony?). The agony-discounting implication seems implausibly extreme, but I’d give the view a minority seat at the table in my “moral parliament”

To my (Nathan's) ears this is either a discontinuous valuation of pleasure and pain across consciousnesses or one that puts far more value at the higher end. In this way the improvement to the life of a human could be worth infinite insects or some arbitrarily large number. 

I am willing to discuss (either in the comments or on a call) any of these arguments. I don't think any of them hold much water and I doubt that in total they are enough to shift the weight of what we should do.

I am glad @Henry Howard🔸 wrote them up, but to the extent there is now a big list of arguments I don't find compelling I am slightly more convinced. 

My response to this is that we can always take medians. And to the extent that the medians multiplied by the number of animals suggest this is a very large problem, the burden is on those who disagree to push the estimates down.

There isn't some rule which says that extremely wide confidence intervals can be ignored. If anything extremely wide confidence intervals ought to be inspected more closely because the value inside them can take a lot of different values. 

I just sort of think this argumend doesn't hold water for me.

Argument: Approximations are too approximate.

@Henry Howard🔸 argues that much of the scholarship that animal welfare estimates are based on is so wide that that it doesn't make clear conclusions:

Unfortunately these ranges have such wide confidence intervals that, putting aside the question of whether the methodology and ranges are even valid, it doesn't seem to get us any closer to doing the necessary cost-benefit analyses.

Argument: The money can be spent over a long time and like will be able to be spent.  

The footnote on the main question says:

In total. You can imagine this is a trust that could be spent down today , or over any time period

Likewise @Will Howard🔹 argues that this isn't that significant an additional amount of money anyway:

"$100m in total is not a huge amount (equiv to $5-10m/yr, against a background of ~$200m). I think concern about scaling spending is a bit of a red herring and this could probably be usefully absorbed just by current intervention"